Downton Abbey Creator to Premiere New Series on NBC

Great scott! Julian Fellowes, the brilliant British mind behind the smash primetime soap opera Downton Abbey,will bring his special brand of salacious high-society drama to the States! NBC announced today that Fellowes signed on to create a series called The Gilded Age, which will follow Manhattan’s wealthiest circles from the late 1800s—think the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts—in place of the U.K.-based Victorian relationships we see within Downton’sCrawley family. “This was a vivid time,” Fellowes said in a statement of New York’s grandiose era, “with dizzying, brilliant ascents and calamitous falls, of record-breaking ostentation and savage rivalry—a time when money was king.” The show is expected to air as early as fall 2013. In the meantime, Downton Abbey’sthird season (including that gorgeous wedding between Lady Mary Crawley and Matthew) returns to U.S. air waves on PBS January 6th. The countdown is on!